Dumplin'

Dumplin'
by Julie Murphy

I ended up picking this up after I watched the movie on Netflix.  The movie was cute and after I saw it was based off a book, I wanted to read it.  

Will is in high school and she's on the heavy side and she knows it.  Her mom is a former beauty queen in charge of the local beauty pageant.  And over the years Will has been on every diet imaginable, but nothing worked and she has accepted that this is just the way her body is.

Her aunt recently died and they were very close.  Her aunt loved Dolly Parton, and I think this was one of the things that made the movie so much fun was all the music.  Will and her mom both really miss the aunt.  This is another reason that her mom worries about her so much, the aunt was only in her thirties when she died, but it was due to being very obese.  She might come off as sharp sometimes to her daughter, but it's because she worries about her.  She wants the best for her, and she worries she will keep gaining weight and eventually end up like her sister.

Eventually Will and a few other girls decide to enter the beauty pageant, which her mom is in charge of.  It's cute, I liked seeing other people in the pageant and not just the cookie cutter girls.

What I wasn't as crazy about in this book was the love triangle.  Will likes two boys and they both like her.  Bo, the boy she works with.  And another classmate, that I am completely blanking out what his name was.  They are both nice boys that seem to treat her well, she just needs to pick without leading the other one on.  I understand she's a confused teenager, but I didn't care for this part of the book.  (I'm kinda glad that in the movie they just dropped one of the characters.)

I see there is a companion book two that follows some other characters from this book, which I will be adding to my reading list.